The ability to turn information into business intelligence is no longer enough to guarantee competitive advantage, it's the speed with which that intelligence can be delivered that really counts says SAS International.

Having made huge investments in technology in the belief that access to quality information and the ability to interpret and exploit that information is key to gaining the edge over competitors, companies are now facing the challenge of getting real value out of those investments.

"The major differentiator when it comes to increasing return on investment in intelligence is the time taken to translate masses of data in multiple systems across the enterprise into information that can be easily understood and used by the organisation," says Art Cooke, president of SAS International, the global arm of business intelligence vendor, SAS Institute.

"There is compelling evidence that the time taken to deliver intelligence to the organisation has a direct impact on improving efficiencies, supporting innovation and driving growth," says Cooke.

In other words, true competitive advantage is not derived purely from the ability to turn transform data into intelligence, but from the ability to do so fast enough to make it count.

To illustrate the importance of speed when it comes to delivering intelligence, Cooke says running an organisation without the necessary information is tantamount to flying an aircraft blind. "Not having information about what is actually going on will put any organisation at a serious disadvantage," he says.

Typically, organisations across the world are forced to wait months for the information needed to run the business because that is how long it takes IT departments to make the necessary changes to data warehouses and other systems to deliver that information. "Quicker time to intelligence also requires the ability to develop new systems in a relatively short period."

Cooke argues that business risk is directly proportional to the time taken to deliver intelligence to the organisation. "A new key performance indicator has got to be a matter of days and weeks, otherwise business opportunities will be missed and bad decisions will be made based on outdated information," he emphasises.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is cited as an example of the kind of business intelligence where a rapid response is required. "Being able to do that type of thing very quickly is key to knowing exactly what is happening among groups of customers as markets change," contends Cooke.

Speed is the essence
Bill Hoggarth, MD of the SAS Institute in South Africa, says faster time to intelligence is enabling a local telecommunications company to target markets as small as a hundred people in marketing campaigns and achieve 90% returns in contrast with around 3% using traditional mass mailing marketing techniques.

Hoggarth says in the highly competitive telecommunications market, companies have a day or less in which to respond effectively to new products introduced by the competition. "However, it is possible to do it if they can analyse, profile, segment and predict behaviour quickly," he says.

"Opening a new retail store or launching a new product requires rapid feedback to be agile enough to change direction according to what is actually happening, instead of what you thought would happen," says Cooke.

In addition to the telecommunications, retail and marketing industries, Cooke and Hoggarth give several examples of how quicker time to intelligence can benefit a wide variety of other industries, particularly banking. "When it comes to preventing fraud and money laundering, near real time intelligence is critical," remarks Cooke.

With such clear benefits, why is every business not embracing the concept? According to Hoggarth, the answer is simply a lack of co-ordination between business information systems and a lack of a single point of control.

"Although organisations have invested heavily in business intelligence systems, very few of them have built those systems on a common platform and consequently there is no way of managing those systems to ensure cross-system awareness and co-ordination," says Hoggarth.

Integrating for efficiency
Cooke, who recently visited South Africa to meet representatives of large enterprise and government departments to discuss their plans to make intelligence ubiquitous, maintains most organisations in the world have fairly "scrappy" business intelligence implementations.

Unsurprisingly, a common business intelligence platform is at the heart of the SAS solution set. Cooke says this approach enables organisations to load, clean, analyses and report large volumes of data up to 50 times faster than traditional methods.

Cooke says bringing data loading, cleaning, storage, analysis and reporting together in a single integrated system is key to achieving faster time to intelligence. "Inefficiencies automatically creep in where each stage of data processing is handled by separate, independent systems."

Hoggarth says the Internet has created the expectation by the business world of being able to get answers to questions and follow up those answers with further questions as they move from one Web site to the next. "Having a business intelligence platform gives business the ability to follow thought patterns as opposed to some predefined hard-wired path."

Another key factor is an optimised data structure that is designed for analysis, says Cooke. He explains this enables sequential scanning of the data, which is much faster than having to continually find the data as required in a transactional data structure.

Cooke says with transactional databases in which 1TB of real data can expand to 4TB, with 3TB of indexes required to enable reporting and analysis work to be done on the data in an acceptable time. "With the SAS approach, 1TB of real data will expand only about 5% in terms of what we need to facilitate the analysis, enabling the system to sweep and analyse that data quickly, without having to continually reference or transact the data."

Cooke and Hoggarth warn organisations against investing too heavily in inflexible infrastructures and disparate systems for processing business data and recommend such investments be executed according to an intelligence strategy for the whole enterprise.

"Don't believe large infrastructure suppliers like Oracle, IBM, SAP and Microsoft. There is a different way of doing these things, and it's a very successful way," says Cooke with a laugh.